Book review: 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs
| Author | Judah Schept |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480612452198 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 523
Dimitri A Bogazianos, 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs, New York University
Press: New York, 2011; 206 pp.: 9780814787014, US$22 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University, USA
In 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music and the War on Drugs, Dimitri Bogazianos has
written a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the relationship between rap music and
crack cocaine. Using a diverse collection of texts, including federal congressional
hearing transcripts, social science research, popular accounts, rap lyrics, and rapper
biographies, Bogazianos traces the intertwined cultural lives of crack and rap.
Bogazianos’s inquiries into crack lead him to interrogate the drug’s pharmacology, the
popular and political responses to its emergence on the streets, and the misguided and
harshly punitive laws created to control and punish its users and dealers. Simultaneously,
Bogazianos demonstrates how rap’s ‘reflexive stance towards its own commercialization’
talked back to both community and structural developments around the ‘crack game’,
including both what he calls the ‘new school violence’ of the streets and the destructive
punishment structure that violently tore communities apart. As such, borrowing from
Raymond Williams (1977), Bogazianos argues that crack cocaine constitutes the lethal
core of a larger ‘criminological structure of feeling’; rap music, he contends, serves as a
primary mechanism through which crack performs its cultural work.
Chapter 1 begins the book by examining the political and cultural articulations of the
punitive turn in US crime control policy. This short but thorough gloss of both the rise of
mass incarceration and the ‘culture of punishment’ (Brown, 2009; Garland, 2001) nicely
positions Bogazianos’s analysis. As he points out in the most compelling section of the
chapter, no prior scholarship has thoroughly interrogated the relationship between crack
and rap; otherwise compelling studies of one have ignored or footnoted the cultural
importance of the other. As Bogazianos suggests, in the wake of deindustrialization and
the profound losses sustained by communities due to violence and mass incarceration,
crack and rap both constituted ‘ways to create spaces of non-humiliating work in the face
of severe social disruption’ (p. 27).
Chapter 2 offers an original and persuasive argument on which Bogazianos subse-
quently builds. Using congressional sentencing reports from across two decades that
discuss crack cocaine’s punishment structure, Bogazianos conducts a dexterous textual
analysis that reveals paradoxical claims about crack’s pharmacology, namely the bizarre
calculation that the more impure the drug the more harshly it should be punished. One
result of such misguided policy is the misrecognition of couriers for ‘kingpins’, the latter
designation attaching itself to people in possession of an amount of crack equal to that of
a few sugar packets: 5 grams.
Chapters 3 and 4 shift Bogazianos’s focus to rap. In Chapter 3, he examines how
rap’s reflexive stances toward both the drug game and the rap industry ‘put crack to
work’. The chapter contains fascinating claims, including an argument that the tendency
of scholarship to construct hip hop as a contaminated product whose revolutionary
potential requires purging its impurities mirrors similar constructs about crack cocaine
embedded in the structure of punishment. Chapter 4 extends the examination of rap’s
reflexivity to explore the changing nature of violence in the crack era. Analyzing rap
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